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Estevan Story Walk encourages literacy

The Story Walk that the Estevan Public Library hosted at Woodlawn Regional Park last week drew good crowds, according to organizer Christine Batke.
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The Story Walk that the Estevan Public Library hosted at Woodlawn Regional Park last week drew good crowds, according to organizer Christine Batke. 

"We decided to move forward with the Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch as the book that would be featured on the Story Walk," said Batke, who is the library’s children’s program co-ordinator. "We already had two copies of it and a third copy was donated thus giving us enough copies and pages to complete the Story Walk."

Batke wasn't sure how successful the Story Walk idea would be, considering when she planned it the temperature was constantly dipping around the -25 C mark, but moved ahead with the idea anyway.

"The Story Walk went over well and I think people liked it a lot and as such this summer and perhaps further into the future we would like to host the walk again," she said. "For our interactive section of the Story Walk, I put out about 50 items per page out and they seemed to go quick, which means hopefully people were stopping and reading." 

She noted that it was really easy to post the stories at the park because a lot of the walking path is surrounded by chain link fence, which allowed her to easily attach pages to them.

The Story Walk ran from Jan. 22 to 27, and for part of the time in which the Story Walk was happening, Estevan received some warmer weather. As a result, Batke noticed a fair amount of people came out for the Story Walk. 

"I did have an overall positive response from the people who attended the park during the Story Walk," said Batke. 

"The only issue I had with mostly using a chain link fence to attach stories was people had to walk rather far to read the entire story, I think I am going to change that for next time. Several people told me that they didn't even know the dog park had so many trails but they are happy to find out," she added. 

Batke was really happy that her outdoor activity did not get vandalized and people from the community really enjoyed the Story Walk concept. 

When the time arrives to encourage literacy in the community, Batke predicted that because of the success of the last Story Walk, she would want to host it again.